'Dimensions of Dialogue' celebrates the world-renowned Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer (born 1934), responsible for some of the most memorable and unique animated films ever realised, and who has strongly influenced filmmakers like Tim Burton and The Brothers Quay.

This publication presents Svankmajer not only as a filmmaker but also as an outstanding fine artist, experimenter, poet and a militant surrealist. Through explorative and informative essays, scholars Bertrand Schmitt and Frantiek Dryje illuminate the various aspects of his output, including puppet theatre, Mannerism, Surrealism and his many collaborations with his wife, Eva Svankmajerová (1940–2005), a surrealist painter, filmmaker and ceramicist. This substantial monograph, named after his 1982 film (noted for its brilliant display of “claymation”) includes a number of reproductions of Svankmajer's art work, film stills, photographs from plays and a selection of documentary images from the life of this internationally respected and multitalented artist.

Kapie Eipak is studying animation at Nayang Technological University in Singapore. His latest short, titled 'Downtown' and set to the song of the same name by Petula Clark, sees a figure sporting a rather drastic bowl haircut escape the crowded city streets.

Gritty Realism Productions are developing the sand-animation technique into new areas including animated feature films, interactive media and fractal programmes, as well as using sand-animation as an educational tool through their partner organisation Gritty Films Ltd.

Gritty Realism is helmed by animator Gerald Conn, who specialises in sand-on-glass animation and won the 1998 BAFTA Cymru best animation for his film 'The Comet's Tale.' Still honing his skills in this technique Gerald Conn and Gritty Realism are currently developing a feature project as an international co-production alongside a number of other film projects that tackle a wide range of topics.

Recently they released this animated film created by Gerald Conn during a residency in the Children's Creativity Museum in San Francisco. The shorts focus is Eadweard Muybridge, a photographer known for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection.

After a nigh on 10 year hiatus, the 'Powerpuff Girls' are returning to our screens in a brand new special titled 'Dance Pantsed'! Due to debut in the US on Cartoon Network, January 20th at 7:30pm.

With the shows creator, Craig McCracken, currently tied up with his new Disney show 'Wander Over Yonder,' directorial duties have been handed over to Dave Smith, a former writer and storyboard artist from the original 'Powerpuff Girls' series.

All of the original series' voice actors will be reprising their roles, with Ringo Starr joining the cast as Fibonacci Sequins, "Townsville’s most flamboyant mathematician."

Synopsis:

"In 'Dance Pantsed', why is Mojo Jojo kidnapping a mathematician, an opera singer and a badger? To steal Chemical X, of course, and to finally take over Townsville. But when the Powerpuff Girls thwart his plan, he invents an evil video game called “Dance Pants R-EVILution” to control their minds and bodies to fulfil his evil plot! The Professor must visit his dark dancing past to save his girls so they can save all of Townsville!"

Directed by Mascha Halberstad, and animated with the help of Huub Kistermaker, 'Goodbye Mister De Vries' sees a frail nonagenarian receive a mysterious parcel containing his old Frisian skates! He heads out on a cold winters day for one last skate...

BUCK teamed up with RPA and Honda to craft a cheery animated tale about Santa trading in his knackered old sleigh for a brand spanking new one complete with a rear-view camera, lane departure warning system, airbags and forward collision warning system!

It was about time Santa upgraded the old sleigh, after hundreds of years whizzing around the globe delivering toy to children, it had nearly 75 billion miles on the clock!

As the animated wheel rotates we see a rather grumpy looking Father Christmas delivering presents transform into a happy child receiving the gifts the following morning... It's a rather clever application of a classic optical trick, we love it!

We spotted the 'Goofy' reworking of Del Toro's classic Alto Chukka sneakers online last week, and deemed them far too ugly to be worth mentioning here. However as the official release date via the Del Toro online store draws near more of the capsule collection has been unveiled.

Whilst the 'Goofy' Chukka's, composed in an acrid blue and green colour-palette, are nothing more than repulsive, some of the other sneakers and slips-ons on offer are actually pretty slick. The classic black and white Mickey Mouse motif works well alongside Del Toro’s signature red heel tab, and the Pinocchio slip-ons cleverly apply a single embroidered image across the pair of shoes.

Moleskine's latest limited-edition notebook series features 'The Simpsons' in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the longest-running scripted TV show!

The collection includes four black & simpsons-yellow pads each featuring a different debossed illustration on the cover, here we've pictured the larger size featuring Homer, and the pocket size featuring Bart. Each notebook also boasts end papers illustrated with views of Springfield, as well as a sheet of 'Simpsons' stickers! Intriguingly the cover belly-bands appear to have walk cycles printed on the reverse, perhaps these can be assembled into your very own 'Simpsons' zoetrope?!

Leah Shore's 2012 'Holidays, I Don't Give A Fuck' was one of the more exciting animated festive greetings we posted on AR last year. Despite featuring a hand-made stop-motion felt-stripper and an ass rimming snowflake, she's topped it this year with a disgustingly bloated rabbit addicted to consuming MSG infused fruitcake!

We'd love to spend Christmas Day at Leah's house, she must have some pretty wild Christmas' to come up with this shit!

Simon Landrein's animated short 'Michel Homm', tells the story of a saucy beach encounter (punctuated with bizarre metaphorical imagery like a fish and a wedge of cheese) that takes an unexpected karate-chopping turn!

The animated adaptation of Raymond Briggs' 'Father Christmas' has already asked what Father Christmas does with himself "the other 364 days of the year?" Never in a million years would we have guessed he liked dressing up in bizarre costumes and indulging in the occasional bondage session!

'Tis the Season' by directing/animation duo Jens & Anna explores the darker side of what Santa and his crew are up to during their time off...

The animated music video for Alameda's new track 'New Leaf' was truly a labour of love for creative studio Legwork. The project took nearly two years to complete as they experienced several setbacks and explored a new animation technique, specifically rotoscoping over 3D animation. (We've posted a short behind-the-scenes video to offer some insight into this process.)

Legworks goal was to merge the hand-made quality of painting with the perfection of 3D camera movement and environments. I'm sure you'll agree their perseverance and dedication to this project shows through in it's innovative and thoroughly compelling aesthetic.

The second collectable figurine collaboration between French sculptural and interior design workshop Leblon-Delienne and Artoyz Originals sees a collection of regular, psychedelic ("fancy") and DIY variants of several Looney Tunes characters.

Mixing the renowned sculpting talent from Leblon-Delienne and the design skills from Artoyz, Daffy Duck, Sylvester and of course Bugs Bunny come to life in vinyl. With regular colour varients sticking to the original character designs, a fancy one exploring poly-chromatic styles, and solid-colour blank vinyl to create your own designs!

All the collection is available direct though Artoyz online store here: Artoyz

Last year, London-based animation studio, Mummu spoilt us with an animated extravaganza of the carol, 'The Twelve Days of Christmas'!

This year they've treated us to an animated tribute to Finnish Lapland, the home of Father Christmas! Rather pleasingly, despite being named after the Babylonian God of craftsmanship and technical skill, Mummu also translates as Granny in Finnish! So 'Hyvää Joulua from Mummu' loosely translates as 'Happy Christmas from Granny!'

Their latest volume is called 'God of Bug Eater' and sees a small insect nibble away at the pages (each page is actually cut with a physical hole), before being consumed by the strange hill-like creature it helped shape!

"You and I will always be together. Be one with me, and we'll become a pretty-coloured forest."

We're really smitten with this animated stop motion fragment by Rhode Island School of Design student, Koji Yamamoto. The piece features a wacky space creature, evocative of 'Button Moon', interrupted from his daily routine by a volcanic eruption.

The work is enticingly titled 'Planet Problems 1', hinting at the prospect of subsequent adventures. We certainly hope we're treated to more... This is fantastic!

Tel-Aviv based illustrator, director and animator Gal Shkedi has taken an unusual approach to his animated Christmas greeting this year. Last years was creepy, but this one damn near scared us to death...

Gal has also directed a seasonal episode of his grim serialised series, 'Death Corporation'. You can watch it (and the rest of the series) here: 'Death Corporation'

We love this time of year, when all the animation studios and independent animators start to release their festive Christmas greetings and shorts. They're always unbridled self expressions of the individuals own style, humour a creativity without having to answer to a particular client or brief. The diversity and scope of talent in the field of animation never ceases to amaze us!

The animators at Bliink, a creative agency based in Brighton, have been busy beavering away like Santa's workshop elves to bring us this environmentally sound festive message...

Animator Galen Pehrson takes musician Devendra Banhart on a psychotropic trip in his video for 'Taurobolium', conceived in the mondo tradition.

“Conceived in the tradition of Mondo – the 1960s sub-genre associated with exploitation, death and taboo – Mondo Taurobolium uses the eponymous track 'Taurobolium' from Banhart’s latest album 'Mala' as a backdrop. The experimental narrative takes dark and existential turns into the murky underbelly of Hollywood.”

Vandalart Gallery, the primary source for collectable Urban Contemporary Art by UK artist and designer Rourke Van Dal, have released an edition of 10 spray painted stencil versions of Rourkes classic 'Mickey Mouth' image. The 2 colour sprayed stencil original is signed and numbered and priced at £175.

Impactist's beautifully animated and wonderfully scored festive bumps for Cartoon Network are essential viewing for any animation or music enthusiast!

We're torn as to whether we love their visuals or music more... We could enjoy both indefinitely!
For this reason we've also posted the unedited version of their electric-peppermint tinged track 'Wintertone,' and urge you to watch/listen to their entire back catalogue. You won't be disappointed!

Brooklyn-based gallery Real Fine Arts is currently exhibiting a series of eight paintings by Antek Walczak titled 'New Transbohemian States." The square canvases are painted in bright block colours with 'state transition diagrams' created to resemble classic cartoon characters. Reading along the lines connecting the dots reveals laugh-out-loud self-parodying slogans like "I want to be a contemporary artist," "Work is much less important than attitude" and "I can reference art formally without worries, because my theoryqueen reading lists resolve problems of contextual history."

Directed by Ben Aston and animated by Nick Black, this rotoscoped music video for The Bishops track 'Polygonn,' the first single taken off their new album 'All Lost Time', is well worth checking out.

Crafted with 2,500 individual hand-drawn illustrations of scratchy line doodles on a bright yellow background, you can almost imagine it was created as a flipbook on a pad of post-it notes! The band should seriously consider producing little promotional flipbook publications featuring excerpts from the video... We'd be first in line to buy them!

AR posted about the excellent 'Poemotion' book by Takahiro Kurashima back in February of 2012. Takahiro Kurashima has now teamed up with Swiss publishing house Lars Müller to produce a hardback edition of the original and 'Poemotion 2,' its full colour sequel!

"In this interactive book abstract patterns start to move as soon as the reader overlays them with the special film sheet enclosed: moiré effects create complex shapes, make circles start to spin, and set graphic patterns vibrating."

Visual artist Carine Khalife is back with her second painterly animated music video for Young Galaxy. You can watch their first music video collaboration 'Blown Minded' here. The new track is called 'Hard To Tell' and taken from Young Galaxy's fourth studio album, 'Ultramarine,' which is available now through Paper Bag Records.

Illustrator, animator and art director Stanley Chow recently unveiled his latest series of gorgeously illustrated prints titled 'Damsels In Distress.' The series features iconic female characters drawn in Stan's own inimitable style. Our favourite in the series has to be 'Olive Oyl,' which is available as a high quality digital print in a variety of sizes ranging from A4 (priced £10.00) to A1 (priced £40.00.) You can purchase a print direct from Stan's online store here: www.stanleychow.bigcartel.com

Jose also kindly contributed an illustration of Dolph, Kearney, Jimbo and Nelson, from his favourite childhood cartoon 'The Simpsons,' to the launch issue of the Animated Review 'zine. Which is available online here: Animated Review Shop, or through a selection of stockists across the UK.

Yule Log 2.0 is an excellent holiday-themed animated project conceived and curated by Daniel Savage, and built by Wondersauce. A selection of 53 different short films, created by 66 artists including animators, illustrators and creative coders, was devised as an updated, re-imagined, homage to the classic Yule Log TV program (1966.)

We've posted a small selection of our favourite Yule Log inspired loops, but the entire project can be viewed over on the Yule Log 2.0 website.

After completing an extensive and hugely successful festival tour, Robert Löbel's animated short 'Wind' is finally up online for us to enjoy in its entirety.

"'Wind' is an animated short about the daily life of people living in a windy area who seem helplessly exposed to the weather. However, the inhabitants have learned to deal with their difficult living conditions. The wind creates a natural system for living"

Robert also kindly contributed an illustration of his favourite childhood cartoon, 'Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles,' to the launch issue of the Animated Review 'zine which is available online here: Animated Review Shop, or through a selection of stockists across the UK.

Inspired by the words of Carl Sagan, in reference to an image of the Earth captured by Voyager 1 at a distance of 4 billion miles, Mothlight Created the animated ode to space exploration and Earths insignificance in the vastness of the universe.

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot, 1994)